Leheriya craft in India dates back to the 17th century. Artisans used five different natural dyes made from plants and minerals.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Leheriya printing was popular among the elites of Rajasthan, it wasn't just a part of their culture but also a sign of status.
There are some things that belong to a land so completely that separating them feels like an injustice. The dunes belong to the Thar. The blue belongs to Jodhpur. And leheriya those rippling, wave-like stripes of colour belongs, without question, to Rajasthan.
Walk through the bylanes of Jaipur on any given morning and you will see it everywhere. On the dupatta of a woman bargaining at the sabzi mandi. On the safa tied around a groom’s head at a wedding. On the turbans of men gathered under a neem tree, their coloulrs cutting sharp against the dry golden landscape. Leheriya isn’t just a textile here it’s a visual language, one that Rajasthan has been speaking for centuries.
A Craft Born from the Desert
The word leheriya literally comes from leher wave. And honestly, the moment you see it, you get it immediately. Colour runs across the fabric in long, diagonal ripples, one after another, almost like the fabric itself is moving. One that looks so much like flowing water comes from Rajasthan, one of the driest, most landlocked states in the country. There’s something poetic about that.
The making of it is not simple, and it was never designed to be. The fabric, usually a fine muslin or silk, is rolled tightly on the diagonal and tied at intervals with thread before being dipped into dye. Wherever the thread is bound, the dye doesn’t reach and that resistance is exactly what creates the stripe. This is what tie and dye really means at its root not a pattern printed on, but a pattern earned through resistance and repetition. For multi-coloured pieces, this whole process is repeated, each time protecting what was dyed before, building colour on colour. It takes time. It takes a real understanding of how dye travels through cloth.
Most people think Leheriya is printed It isn't. Every wave begins on a plain piece of fabric with no pattern at all.The design is created long before a single colour touches the cloth. The fabric is carefully rolled and tied by hand. Hundreds of tiny bindings decide where colour can go-and where it cannot.Before the dye, the pattern already exists in imagination. The fabric is carefully rolled, tied, and to dye by hand to create its signature flowing patterns.
Then comes the first dye bath. The fabric is dipped into colour, but the tied sections resist the dye. Like a memory being preserved, some parts remain untouched. For multiple colours, the process starts all over again. Tie. Dye. Dry. Each colour is added in layers, one after another.Inside the dye vat, something remarkable happens.
The artisan cannot fully see the final pattern. The waves reveal themselves only when the knots are opened Every piece carries a little surprise. That is why no two Leheriyas are ever exactly alike. The folds change. The ties shift. The colours flow differently. Small imperfections become signatures of the hand that made them. Leheriya isn't drawn. It isn't printed. It is tied, dyed, and patiently revealed A craft where the pattern is not created- it is uncovered.
Tarang
Why Leheriya Belongs to Rajasthan
why Rajasthan specifically? Leheriya is a dyeing technique, after all. Theoretically, it could be done anywhere. But that’s exactly the kind of thinking that misses the point.
Leheriya belongs to Rajasthan because of everything tied to this place the light, the people, the meaning behind it. The bright, intense Rajasthani sun is part of why these colours look the way they do. This palette wasn't made for soft, overcast days. It was made for this light.
Then there are the rangrez families the dyer communities concentrated in and around Jaipur who have carried this craft for generations. This knowledge doesn’t live in manuals or mood boards. It lives in hands. In the muscle memory of someone who has been rolling and binding fabric since they were a child, watching a parent do it before them. That kind of inheritance cannot be relocated or replicated quickly. It takes generations to build and it is fragile in ways that are easy to underestimate.
But honestly, what makes leheriya truly Rajasthan’s is none of that. It’s the emotional weight it carries here. It’s the safa a groom’s family spends weeks choosing. It’s the dupatta a mother picks out for her daughter before a wedding. It’s what women wear for Teej, for Gangaur, for every occasion that deserves colour. It’s not a product people buy it’s something people reach for when a moment matters.
Colour Is Not Decoration Here It’s a Language
In Rajasthan, colour has never just been about aesthetics. It means something. It communicates something. The colours you wear tell people where you’re going, what you’re celebrating, sometimes even where you’re from. That relationship between people and colour here is unlike anywhere else.
And within that, the tradition of pachrang five colours together is one of the most beautiful expressions of Rajasthani culture. The belief is simple but profound: that five colours, when brought together, create something more complete than any single colour could on its own. It shows up in the Pacharanga Safa, the five-coloured turban tied for weddings and celebrations, worn with an ease and confidence that only comes from generations of knowing exactly how to carry colour. Saffron next to green. Pink beside indigo. Yellow resting against red. In any other context it might feel like too much here it feels exactly right.
This is a landscape that can be harsh and unsparing long summers, dry winds, terrain that doesn’t soften easily. And yet people here have always dressed in defiance of that. They chose colour not despite the difficulty of their surroundings, but almost because of it. Colour as resistance. Colour as celebration. Colour as a daily, conscious act of joy.
Panchrangi leheriya carries all of that within it. Five colours arranged in waves, worn for the moments that matter. There’s a reason it appears at every festival, every wedding, every occasion worth marking in Rajasthan. It’s not just pretty it’s meaningful. It holds something.
And that, more than anything, is what drew us to it when we began thinking about Tarang.
Tarang: How We Found Our Way Back to Rajasthan
Every collection starts somewhere. A feeling, a memory, a question you keep coming back to. For Tarang, we kept coming back to one image five colours, moving together in waves. We kept coming back to Rajasthan.
It wasn’t a brief we sat down and wrote. It was more gradual than that. The more we explored leheriya, the more we found ourselves pulled into the world around it the pacharanga tradition, the safas, the way colour functions in Rajasthani life not as decoration but as emotion. And somewhere in that exploration, Tarang started to take shape.
The name felt right immediately. Tarang wave. It echoes leheriya without copying it. It speaks to movement, to rhythm, to the idea that something can travel forward and still carry where it came from.
What we wanted to do with this collection was not recreate. Reproduction felt like the wrong instinct leheriya already exists in its most authentic form in Rajasthan, made by hands that have spent lifetimes understanding it. What we could offer was a reinterpretation. Our own conversation with the craft. something we tried to carry into our own handcrafted pieces of women’s wear.
So we took the five-colour pachrang tradition and reimagined it in soft pastels. The same diagonal waves, the same layering, but lighter. Airier. More suited to how we dress today and how summer actually feels on your skin. Silhouettes that don’t demand attention but reward it. Prints that feel familiar the first time you see them, like something you’ve known for a long time without quite knowing why.
For us, pachrang became more than a colour story. It became the whole philosophy behind the collection. Five colours each distinct, each complete on its own coming together into something that is richer, more alive, more interesting than any one of them could be alone. We kept thinking about that. About how the most beautiful things are rarely singular. About how harmony doesn’t mean sameness.
Tarang holds that belief at its centre. It is light without being throwaway. It is rooted without being rigid. It is deeply connected to Rajasthan to its craft, its colour, its spirit and at the same time it is entirely of this moment.
Tarang is a tribute to Pachrang
a celebration of colours, culture, and togetherness, where five colours come together in harmony. Deeply rooted in Rajasthan, the collection draws inspiration from the beauty of Pacharanga Safas, the elegance of Panchrangi Leheriya, and the emotions and traditions woven through colour.
Reimagining this nostalgia through soft pastel hues, airy summer silhouettes, and delicate leheriya prints,
Tarang feels both fresh and deeply connected to its roots.
For us, Pachrang is more than colour
it is a symbol of unity, where different shades, energies, and people come together beautifully as one. Light, airy, and rooted in Rajasthan, the collection carries tradition with a softer, contemporary spirit.
We didn’t approach Tarang as a trend. We approached it as a conversation with craft, with Rajasthan, with the idea that the things made most carefully and most honestly are always the ones that last.
Leheriya has survived centuries not because it was preserved behind glass but because people kept choosing it. For their weddings, their festivals, their most important days. We hope Tarang earns a place in moments like that too quieter ones, everyday ones, the kind that don’t always make it into photographs but stay with you anyway.